23/11/2017 14:21 AST
“SABIC is a materials company who has been looking at additive manufacturing for a while, trying to find our place in the value chain,” says Keith Cox, Senior Business Manager, Additive Manufacturing at the Saudi-born firm, as a whistle-stop tour of its formnext powered by TCT booth commences. Cox takes TCT from shelf to transparent cabinet to stand, to demonstrate the capabilities and vision of the latest chemistry specialist entering the additive space. At each stop, a different application printed in a different material, some already on the market, some announced that very day, and some still in development. The 45-minute conversation spanned the company’s motivation to enter the additive manufacturing (AM) market, its ideology now here, and Cox’s assessment of the task at hand.
The company stepped up its AM activities in May, announcing three product families of high-performance filament grades for FDM at RAPID+TCT, having previously only been a supplier of resins to the market. Like the array of other industrial heavyweights to have moved into AM, SABIC eyes the it as a profitable sector, but also appreciates the need to offer something different to its peers.
“I think what we bring that is relatively unique to the industry is we have got a strong materials focus, but as well, we invest heavily in the process development,” Cox stresses. “We also have a strong connection as well with OEMs and we focus on application development. What we try to do is marry those three things together: product, process, and application, to optimise our materials currently with process optimisation, and development process. That has allowed us to be very successful in a wide variety of conversion processes.
“Our overall approach is to take that same approach for additive manufacturing. Design the materials, optimise the processes concurrently for those so we have the materials we can bring in and market which have higher performances than what is available today, truly designed for additive. That’s the over-arching message of what we’re trying to do.”
The product families launched at RAPID+TCT were the ULTEM 9085 material, which has FST (fire, smoke, toxicity) compliant properties and is best-suited to the aerospace industry; the CYCOLAC AMMG94F, which is a ‘general purpose’ filament with good impact performance but lower temperature resistance; and the AM1110F, a LEXAN polycarbonate (PC), which is a high temperature material. All of these materials can run in Stratasys Fortus machines in standard conditions – SABIC, a supplier of resin to Stratasys, sees the Fortus as one of the most industrialised processes on the market.
SABIC followed up its RAPID materials launches with another FDM-compatible product at formnext: the LEXAN EXL AMHI240F filament; and the THERMOCOMP large format family of materials. The firm also has materials for SLS in development.
Cox is sure to emphasise that bringing new materials to market is only part of the company’s additive philosophy. He reiterates the desire to deliver products that aren’t yet available and is dividing new releases into three categories. The first category concerns materials like the ones launched at RAPID, which can be dropped into a Stratasys Fortus machine and run in standard conditions. The second category sees materials with ‘differentiated’ properties compared to those already on the market but can still run in standard conditions within Stratasys printers.
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